You’ve certainly heard about the “Christian genocide in Nigeria,” or that “Nigeria is the most dangerous country in the world for Christians” or perhaps seen headlines about “Fulani terrorists.”

 

 It is true that Christians are being killed in Nigeria, and it is right to grieve over these deaths. Many Christians are living a nightmare with no hope of dawn. But did you know that it’s not just Christians who are being brutally murdered by Muslims? Muslims are also suffering horrible atrocities at the hands of Christians. In some cases, Muslims are slaughtering each other, and sometimes it’s Christians killing other Christians. These are the heartbreaking realities that aren’t being reported by Christian journalists. It doesn’t make the suffering less terrible based on where it comes from, but it does mean that we should be listening more before we offer solutions or take sides. It highlights the truth that just because someone identifies as Christian and gets killed doesn’t mean that they were killed for their faith.

 

 I am a Christian, I am an American, and I have also had the privilege of living in West Africa for years, visiting Nigeria multiple times, and maintaining close friendships with people in that country. Because of connections with people on the ground there, I know that the narrative we constantly hear is only one side of the story. 

 

Proverbs 18:13 To answer before listening—that is folly and shame.

 

 Proverbs 18:17 He who tells his story first makes people think he is right until the other comes to test him. 

 

This ancient wisdom from Solomon keeps rolling over and over in my mind as I listen to the eruption of popular Christian opinion on the conflict in Nigeria. A lot of misinformation is being passed around as fact, and many people don’t even want to hear the other side—how Muslim communities are being burned and their people murdered by those who call themselves Christians. 

 

The situation in Nigeria is complex and volatile and the whole country is brimming with suffering, not just since we started hearing about it in the last year, but for heartbreaking, bloody decades. Framing all the violence as religious conflict ignores the plethora of economic, ethnic, historical and international factors that have a profound affect on the atrocities that we hear about. 

 

These waves of violence stem from different issues. Jihadist groups like Boko Haram have been a force of terror and  havoc. Banditry and kidnapping have flourished like poisonous weeds with devastating results. Then too, there is the struggle of various ethnic groups to survive in a densely populated nation with limited resources, which is the issue I would like to focus on here as it generates widespread destruction and death.

 

Fulani herders (typically Muslim,) and farmers (typically Christian,) used to live together in harmony, but with population explosion,  there is no longer space for Fulani people to freely roam on the range with their cattle, and the pasture lands that their families have used for generations are being sewn into crops by farmers, and the herders are no longer welcome. Adding to the problem is the widespread usage of chemical fertilizers. Farmers no longer depend on cattle for the organic fertilizer they leave behind when grazing the stubble after harvest, and so cattle and the people who herd them are seen by farmers as a liability rather than an asset, and herders are increasingly desperate for places to graze their cattle.

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In this charged environment, accidents happen: crops get damaged, cows get killed, and these events quickly escalate into ferocious cycles of violence and bloody revenge.

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Yet the anguish of Muslims, including the Fulani, goes largely unreported. Worse still, Christian news articles and podcasters in America frequently refer to the Fulani as a terrorist group. This is akin to claiming that the American Blacks are a drug cartel, which is not only false, but cruel to speak that way. We promote ethnic cleansing when we repeat these lies against them. 

 

Tribalism is, sadly, still strong within the Christian church in West Africa, and even devout believers in Jesus, who I worked alongside of there, viewed Fulani people as strange and stupid. When people meet Jesus, the beliefs of a lifetime aren’t instantly broken down, and anti-Fulani sentiment is one of those. Fulani people are unreached, and usually unwanted by the Nigerian church. In fact, many Nigerian pastors exhort their congregations to kill Fulani people. Nigeria is deeply fractured along ethnic lines, and racism is stronger there than it was in America at the end of the civil war. As the American church, we should be walking alongside our brothers and sisters in Nigeria by helping them to see people like Jesus does, and reach out in love, rather than joining the Anti-Fulani tide. We should be listening to the issues that are driving the racism, segregation and hatred in order to offer solutions that show the mercy of God to people on both sides of the conflict, not just the people of our “tribe”, in this case, Christians. 

 

But even when it actually is true that Muslims are targeting Christians for their faith, then what? Why is the call across America for killing Muslims? Have we forgotten the Mercy that intercepted us on our own wretched road of destruction, the kindness that led us to repentance? 

 

We serve the God who did not rescue righteous Naboth from the murderous jealousy of the king and queen, the God who allowed John the Baptist to go to the guillotine at the whim of a wicked woman, the God who waits even while the souls of many martyrs in heaven cry out “How long?!” Vengeance belongs to our God. He WILL repay. It’s our job to feed our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us and entrust ourselves to our Faithful Creator. 

 

Our King intimately knows what it is to suffer unjustly, to be slandered, tortured, viciously killed. It makes the ire rise in all of us to read His story and have the hideous injustice of it all scald our hearts. Instead he calls us to follow him in this jaw-dropping kindness —to lay down our lives for our enemies—to forgive rather than take vengeance—to love when you get nothing but cruelty and death in return. 

 

He invites you today, “Follow me!” 

 

Will you follow The King?